Category Archives: Fun

So, on December the 7th, the culmination of four weeks intense work came together in an amazing event at Protein‘s gallery off Curtain rd in Shoreditch.

I had spent days trawling through all the till data from the coffee shop to work out quantities of caffeine, water, milk, coffee etc served over the first complete year of the buisness.

From there, I commissioned artists and illustrators to produce a limited edition print with the most concise of briefs. 1.33Kg of caffeine, 873liters of water, 64.6Kg of paper cups were some of the data-points that lead to surreal abstractions by our chosen contributors. Despite the macro level briefs, strong patterns emerged in the pallets used.

I also trawled through a years worth of coffee bags, saved by the shop, to build a database of origin, varietal, roaster and roast date to help lead an educational data-visualisation that would show the seasonality and other trends of specialty coffee. The amazing Signal-Noise stepped up and gave their time for free to the project, creating the brilliant video below. This actually runs as a programme on coffee.signal-noise.co.uk but for the sake of easy embedding I have included the video. Once again I gave the simplest of briefs, to encourage their own take on my idea and they came through with an intelligent, abstract map projection to bring clarity to the popularity of European roasters while still describing the equatorial growing regions beautifully.

The last point of the tryptic was a bespoke IOS game by app developers Johnny Two Shoes. They took the engine for their much hyped upcoming game prevail, and re-imagined a world of espresso ships delivering coffee beans for you to feed to messrs Dunne and Frankowski (who were transmorphicated (is that a word?) into a horse and ostrich respectively . Positioned in a swivel mount that I built, the game will be available to play in the shop for the foreseeable future. There are even plans to include aspects of the game in the final release of Prevail next year, but it’s all a bit hush hush for now.

The turn out for the event was a huge success, filling out the space to bursting. I’d like to thank a few people that donated time, product and cold hard cash to enable us to put this one:

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Once again my week has been filled with weird and wonderful play, thanks to the strange mind of Miss Cakehead. This time, amongst various jobs like signage and dressing for a ‘Butcher of human meat’ I was asked to create pools of blood that could be peeled off the floor of Smithfields meat market without leaving a stain.

Normal theatrical blood is full of dye and remains liquid for hours if not days, giving the gloopy mess plenty of time to infect the floor in question.
My solution to such a specific request was to mix up an Agar Agar solution and colour it down.

This worked well to produce something that set hard upon touching the cold floor but was a little too transparent to be convincing blood. To remedy this, I slowly added cocoa powder to the mixture and poured a second, more textured and opaque layer over what essentially became a release layer.

Lastly, to add the desired congealed effect, I got on my hands and knees to move the top coat around with blasts of blowing. This rippled up the darker layer and in one case looked quite revolting, perfect…

As you can see the finished pool looked like congealed, fresh, liquid blood. In fact, it was solid enough to survive a couple of careless feet and peeled off the floor leaving almost nothing (a couple of seconds of wiping with paper were needed) behind.

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The Cornwall chapter of Andrews of Arcadia has drawn its curtains for the last time this year.

Filled with great talks from the likes of Messrs Luke Jennings, Tom O’Reilley, Neil Thomson and art from Pete Fowler, I stepped in to build something out of the array of vintage bite alarms that Mr Andrews had at his disposal.

Most of the following was conceived and constructed on site at Port Eliot festival, in a small tent, with a couple of empty cans of Tribute and a pen knife.

At times, the land of Arcadia looked like an IRA munitions factory, at others a civilised place of learning and tea. I was utterly responsible for the former and with the exception of a bit of IT, had nothing to do with the latter.

Some notable quotes from the weekend:

“This is Bruno, the only man to turn up to a festival with a suitcase filled with explosives (It was miliput, not C4)… and tweed”

“Bruno is the David Niven of IT”

obviously I only remember the personal quotes, but to learn more, click on some of the links above to read more from an alternate perspective.